Author: Lucas Matney

TECHCRUNCH Online gamers love to talk a big game, but how willing are they to put their money with their mouth is? Players Lounge is a home for gamers looking to make friendly wagers with strangers and friends in head-to-head matches. When we first covered the startup back in 2015, the team was getting people together at bars in New York for one-off FIFA tournaments on slow nights. Since then, Players Lounge has moved towards greater scalability, though their niche has still centered heavily on sports titles like FIFA and Madden. The company is launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class with some new funding and some new plans to capture gamers’ attention. The company is already expanding beyond its console sports roots, and has added support for titles like Fortnite and Call of Duty, though there’s still a lot of room for the company to flex on PC which hosts some of the most devoted gamers. After connecting their gaming accounts, users load cash onto the platform via credit card, PayPal or Bitcoin and can use the funds to enter into head-to-head wagers. The company takes 10 percent of wagers. Bets can range from $2.50 to $500. When it comes to legality, because eSports are considered a game of skill in most states, Players Lounge can operate without a hitch. A few states still don’t allow it though,...

TECHCRUNCH The top widely-available VR headset that money can buy is… gonna take a lot of money to buy. HTC has released pricing info for its Vive Pro headset that the company showed off at CES and it ain’t cheap. The company had previously detailed that they would begin selling the system as a headset-only package for customers looking to upgrade. The price for that headset is going to be a very steep $799, a price that might have made sense in 2016, but sits far above what other comparable headsets on the market are retailing for now. Pre-orders...

TECHCRUNCH Upload, the VR startup which was rocked by a sexual harassment suit exactly one year ago, is shutting down both its San Francisco office and its 20,000 sq. foot Los Angeles co-working space as it struggles to secure new funding, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. All of the company’s LA employees were laid off yesterday. The company’s SF office lease has already been taken over. The startup’s VR-focused trade publication, UploadVR, which operates independently of the company’s other ventures, has not been affected yet, sources tell us. The layoffs and office shut downs come as the company has had trouble...

TECHCRUNCH For how massive Reddit is in terms of user base, it’s really gotten by for a long time having a product that advanced about as quickly as Drudge Report. That’s been changing lately, as the company has looked to mature their platform with user-centric features that make surfing content easier and keep everything a bit more connected. The company didn’t raise $200 million from top investors just because they thought the company could deliver memes more beautifully. The company has — in fact — barely touched advertising, and few entities know more about its users interests than Reddit....

TECHCRUNCH Lighting can make or break the right photo, when it comes to static environments inside virtual reality that users can move around in, this becomes exponentially more true. Today, Google released a new app for VR devices focused on helping users make sense of “light fields.” They’ve also got a blog post running down some of the research work that they’re doing. Light fields — in a practical sense — are basically different perspectives of a point in space based on how that lighting looks from that angle. If you look at something like your phone screen, part...

TECHCRUNCH Video games are about to look a lot more like the real world. If you’ve enjoyed the thrill of driving through GTA V and spying out Los Angeles landmarks, then that’s a sentiment you’re probably going to start feeling a lot more often while you play video games. Google is making its Maps API play nice with video game designers, giving them access to the real world’s geography and geometry, throwing 100 million 3D buildings, landmarks and more into developer’s design repertoires. Game studios will be able to use these maps to serve as the basis of their digital...

TECHCRUNCH Google Assistant is about to start doing more without quite as much talking on your part. Long-awaited multi-step routines are just today starting to roll out to users in the U.S., as first spotted by Android Police. In the case of “Good Morning,” which seems to be the first of the multi-step routines to go live, you can get Assistant to do stuff like turn on your lights, tell you about your calendar or the weather and traffic, and then pop on some tunes or a podcast. Google will be starting with six specific routines according to the...

TECHCRUNCH Despite wave after wave of startups vowing to kill email, electronic mail has never been stronger. It seems the best way to live with emails is to let AI steal the job of writing them. EasyEmail, emerging from Y Combinator’s latest batch, is aiming to get inside your inbox and help you navigate future messages using the past as a guide with an autocomplete-like feature. After downloading the Chrome plugin, the service spends 10-20 minutes pouring through your sent messages and building up a good idea of how you write emails. From there, the service lounges in your...